A study of the economic and operational impact of robust unit commitment

Summary form only given: Unit commitment, one of the most critical tasks in electric power system operations, faces new challenges as the supply and demand uncertainty increases dramatically due to the integration of variable generation resources. To meet these challenges, we propose a two-stage adaptive robust unit commitment model and a practical solution method. We present a numerical study on the real-world large scale power system operated by the ISO New England. Computational results demonstrate the economic and operational advantages of our model over the traditional reserve adjustment approach. In particular, we find that by properly setting the level of conservatism in the uncertainty model, the adaptive robust model exhibits sizable savings on average dispatch cost, and significantly reduces the volatility of the dispatch cost, thus, improves the real-time reliability of the power system operation. The robust model also shows resilient performance under different probability distributions of uncertain load.